May 11, 2007

Recently, NEWSgrist had the opportunity to sit with Art Fag City and shoot the shit. Okay, full disclosure: I do do other things:

Recently I was invited to be an Artist in Residence by a fantastic spin-off of the Creative Commons called iCommons and to attend their annual summit, which will be held this year in Dubrovnik. Art Fag City honcho Paddy Johnson will be the art blogger in attendance. She is helping launch the residency by interviewing each of us artists, either in person (locally in NYC/Bkyn) or via Skype:

[via AFC]: Art Intercom is a six part series conducted by Art Fag City blogger Paddy Johnson, who will be interviewing the iCommons Summit Artists in Residence.
In the weeks leading up to the conference, interviews will be posted
once weekly, profiling the artists’ work and describing their approach
to Creative Commons licensing. Artists to be interviewed include Ana Husman, Jaka Železnikar, Joy Garnett, Kathryn Smith, Nathaniel Stern and this weeks interviewees, Mike Sarff and Tim Whidden (who go by the names M.River and T.Whid), of MTAA. Tim will be representing MTAA as one of the Artists in Residence at the iSummit in Dubrovnik.

A two-part interview with MTAA has been posted here and here; my interview was posted here today, and a portion of it is also up on AFC:

I've just spent five days blogging about seven fairs, so maybe I'm too
dazed to be commenting here now, but I can't tear myself away from the
keyboard. For 20 years I supported my art life as an editor, working on
Madison Ave., largely for women's magazines (the pay was good and it
gave me enough time to paint) until I had enough and made the leap full
time into the studio. What I see in the art world now world is a "fashionization" of art that is just getting more intense: the art
trends (like fashion moments, which which keep cycling faster and
faster), the age thing (will we all have to be size 0, too, if we want
to show or sell work?), the celebrity-ification of artists more intense
than it has ever been, and now what seems to be an insane ramping up of
the art fairs. As I was schlepping from venue to venue, I was thinking
how like Fashion Week it was, with a bit of The Academy Awards thrown
in, what with the celebrities, the parties, the who-what-where is hot,
and the art must-haves this holiday season. Eek.

I attend the
fairs. I get to show in them. I blog them. I enjoy them as a welcome
break from my solitary work in the studio. Hey, I had a great time in
Miami. But when I hear dealers talking about giving up their
bricks-and-mortar spaces in favor of a gallery identity and an
itinerant reality, that scares me. And what happens when—as with all
fashion trends—the art fair trend dies down?

By the way Ed, in
the midst of all the hype about sales that permeated the fairs, your
wonderful artist Jennifer Dalton shows drawings with amusing and
terrifying statistics about artists and the artworld. Most artists need
to work an outside job to support themselves, many don’t have health
insurance, and if they’re lucky, they’ll make about $30,000 a year from
the sale of their work.

MIAMI BEACH [...] For people locally referred to as V.V.V.I.P.'s that might include,
say, a business breakfast with Steven A. Cohen, the multibillionaire
collector; a lunch given by the art dealer Larry Gagosian; a stop at a Yoko Ono
installation in a hotel lobby; a cocktail party at a $14 million trophy
apartment, which happens to be on the market; a dinner with Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones
given by a billionaire Turkish developer; and an after-party given by
Colette Dance Class from Paris at a club called Mansion. After that,
well in Miami Beach the night is always young.

All of these things, of course, are auxiliary to the main event, which is the art fair or fairs.

"Now
you have Pulse, Flow, Aqua, Nada, Scope and the Design Miami fair
downtown," said Mary Hoeveler, who runs Citigroup's art advisory, a
sort of personal shopping service for aesthetically enlightened
plutocrats. Ms. Hoeveler was referring to the satellite fairs that have
sprung up like camp followers to the main art fair, each organized to
accommodate a market segment and each held in one of the city’s
seemingly limitless supply of disused warehouses or boutique hotels.

"Miami
stakes it all on Miami Basel now," she said, and it is certainly true
that where the beach once seemed wreathed in a fog bank of Hawaiian
Tropic tanning lotion, the sweet aroma of wealth now floats in the air. "The money is burning a hole in people's pockets, and they’re here to
spend," Ms. Hoeveler said.

Just to thumb-tap all the pertinent
social data of a day into a BlackBerry might induce torment, seizure or
at least repetitive stress injury. But it would be good pain for the
roughly 38,000 people who descended on this beach town and is easily
cured by opening one's wallet and watching bills fly.

"They're
getting so rich so fast now it's hard to keep up," said someone in the
crowd that formed early on Wednesday, "Supermarket Sweep"-style,
outside the Convention Center, awaiting a signal for the noontime
V.I.P. preview to begin.

When the doors opened, the throng
rushed forward, racing toward favorite dealers' booths. These were not
housewives wearing kerchiefs and rollers but socialites and hedge fund
billionaires and Silicon Valley tyros and Palm Beach matrons with faces
as taut and expressionless as the ones on inflatable love dolls.

"Art
Basel essentially invented Miami Basel to cater to North American and
South American capital," said Nadja Swarovski, of the famous crystal
manufacturing company, who sponsors one of the week's big events. Ms.
Swarovski was referring to Miami Basel's parent entity, a respected
traditional art fair in Switzerland. "The world is flat now," Ms.
Swarovski said. "The borders are breaking down. Cultures are merging." [more...]